


Fortunes Upon Fortunes

by amberwing



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 08:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberwing/pseuds/amberwing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Varric is a storyteller, for better or for worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fortunes Upon Fortunes

 

 

> And I've written pages upon pages
> 
> Trying to rid you from my bones

 

He writes the story he'd like to have heard, with all its danger and drama.  Mother raised them--him and Bartrand both, even if the bastard played like he couldn't quote Gorin and the Golden Nug upside down--to know the use of a tall tale, a fantasy.  Gotta build yourself one, protect yourself with armour of untruth.  It has to be just elaborate enough to satisfy the author and just simple enough to amuse the uneducated.

So he's Varric Tethras.  He's writing a novel about Hawke.  He makes it up as he goes along: how she was carried cradled in dragon's talons from a burning cliff, how she's an apostate, how she fights mean as any rogue.  All these lies.  She isn't much of a mage.  Maker knows Blondie has to patch her up almost as much as Isabela.  As Hawke tells it, there was a lot more vomiting on that dragon flight than armchair conversation with the Witch of the Wilds.  And yes, she's good with those little knives of hers, but remember the time she stabbed her brother instead of the Coterie thug he was holding?

Glorification.  Elaboration.  Decoration.  Lies.  Varric is a nobleman; he drank as many subtle untruths as mother's milk.  Hawke has hair black as dragonglass and eyes like spilled lyrium; she smells of blood and ashes and bitter herbs.  She is witty enough to spar with Hightown nobility and more noble than any of those residing therein.  She loves an escaped slave, a living weapon; he despises magic and yet!  And yet Hawke is his; he is hers.

Varric doesn't write of the scars, the sweat, the early grey at her temples, the aches in healed bones she limps and complains of when it rains.  There's no room for her tiredness and her tenderness, for the freckles on her shoulders and the sad quirk of her smile.  Varric can't speak of how tightly she holds Fenris's hand when she thinks no on is looking--and Varric, Varric's good at looking when he's not supposed to.  Her fingers wrap around the elf's lyrium marks as if to hide them, tight enough that their glow sets her veins alight.

He doesn't speak of her empty mansion, of the weight she's lost and never regained.  How he thinks, sometimes, that the engine of her body is slowing as years go by, while the gears of Kirkwall grind ever onward.  He can't write of how she sits at his fireside and asks, "So how does the story end?"

"It doesn't," he answers.


End file.
